We are used to thinking of Elizabethan (and Jacobean) literature with Shakespeare at the center, but evidence suggests that, although Shakespeare was considered an important writer in the last decade of the queen’s reign, Thomas Nashe was one of the dominant literary voices.

When European explorers first began traveling into the interior of the African continent, they brought Shakespeare with them. This excerpt from Shakespeare in Swahililand, written by Edward Wilson-Lee, relates the expedition of Richard Francis Burton and his search for the source of the Nile.